This project consists of ares covered in 3D Modelling and also Animation lessons along with VFX implementations.
I started by making a mood board consisting of my ideas, references such as the likes of R.O.B and WALL.E along with many varieties of claws and legs.
I went into further specialisation on my design choices by doing basic sketches for the robot I planned to model within Maya.
After setting my project in Maya, I started by modelling the head, taking inspiration from my mood board to do so.
Next, I extruded out a neck from the same mesh.
Following on from the neck, I extruded the outer sides of the body.
Using the outer sides, I created the rest of the body.
I created a joint that would later be able to rotate the arms during rigging.
I then made a second joint to connect both sides of the arm.
Completing the arm area, I made a joint to connect the arms and fingers together and also connections between each part of the finger.
I then made the legs and their joints.
I went back and did some changes to the face, I used booleans to create indents in the face as an oppose to the sticky-out eyes. I later saw a flaw to this and extruded the eyes inwards slightly to allow for the eyes to be animated if nessacery.
I then finished the UVing process to make sure textures were correctly mapped onto the model, a flaw to this was the many, many different UV shells but I am dragging and dropping textures into certain materials so it wasn't the biggest problem in this scenario (below).
I assigned the main parts with different materials to make it easy to texture, I then needed to rig it.
I started by making the skeletal structure for the model, to do this I began with the center joint, all other joints will be stemmed off of this one joint in order to allow for the robot to have working limbs in order to animate in alongside my VFX project. Here I went and finished the first part of the rigging process, a process I seemed to get the hang of quite quickly, only really having flaws in terms of perspective and joints not aligning properly to the body of the mesh.
I then bonded skin to the join structure. As you can see here, the mesh conforms to the joint skeleton but will distort upon being moved. If I wanted to fix this, I'd have to paint weights upon the skin to determine what joints have what influence on other joints.
Here you can see that the weights are correctly applied to the skin in order to prevent any distortion.
NOTE: In a secondary example, you can see that influence is not just black (0% influence) and white (100% influence) as there is a full range of how much influence a joint can have on certain areas.
A model representing the anatomy of something such as a human should really have these kind of influences because skin connects all throughout the body whereas in my case, robot joints should not.
As you can see, the joints are now correctly in influencing the skin in my favor.
I now needed to set up a control panel to make animating easier.
I decided to use IK Handles on each leg to make manipulating the joints during animation simpler and then parent these to NURBS circles for ease of access. A problem I encountered is that the IK Handles I creates would move the knees outwards by default and this was not my designed intention. To solve this I had to rotate the mesh using the joints in my desired angle and then set that angle as the preferred angle in the skeleton settings. After this it then behaved in the way I wanted it to.
At this point, I realized I made a critical mistake, joints were not correctly aligned to the center of each part of the mesh meaning rotations would be wonky and annoying to use in animation. I changed this, rebound the skin, repainted the weights and worked up to the point where I had previously been at above.
After the problem was resolved and I had got to where I previously was, I gave controllers to all the main joints being arms, fingers and legs.
Due to animation issues which would come around later on due to my rig, I had to ditch parts of the sholder joints to make animating easier.
The rig was now complete, I now had to implement it into the other scene with the camera footage in to animate the robot.
Now it was in the matchmove scene I was able to start the animation process. The animation process was the same process as the Bonnie walk cycle and the bouncing ball animation but this project has an implenented render camera inside it. Alonside this, I had to change the matchmove scene I was using because of complications with keeping geometry alinged with point clouds, this new scene fixed the issue.
The scene finaly started to take proper shape with the addition of the textures I created on Substance Painter.
Alongside this I added textures I made for the computer and mouse project along with their respective models. I did however have to remove the cables from them because they would cause issues during animating.
The concept of animation I went with was for the robot to smash his hands down on the keyboard, supplemented by the angry shaking of his head to further represent the feeling of rage to fit breif specifications.
I then added the render-cam to a skydome in preparation for rendering within Maya. To finish of a realistic look, I inserted ai shadowMatte textures onto hidden geomoetry so that when it would be played in the video it would create a nice looking shaded effect. The process of rendering was lengthy soley down to how long it took because it didn't take a lot of effort.
The render left me with a .tif image for each frame of the animation. I had to couple these images with the original video to create the final video. I rendered this is high quality 1080p resolution and the video was done.
Final rendered video.
This is the project I'm most proud of becuase of the length and the fact I overcame a lot of issues. Due to this I didn't only learn how to animate on a much more complex scale then ever before along with all the other stages of the project but I also learned how to keep cool under the pressure of deadlines which will be very useful in the future when industries need me to do things quickly. If I had more time I'd definately incorporate some more movement from parts like the legs and also do a longer animation sequence.
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